this is my first discussion topic I started and a quite impotant one for me.

The problem is that my little brother is heavily struggling in school and because we life in Germany it is a Public School and you have to go there until you are 18 years old. He is getting terrible grates and he is getting into truble with the teachers. He has to go to a regular Public School for at least 6 more years and with his current grades he will be forced to double a year if he doesn’t start improving.

Me, thinking that the schools here in Germany are bullshit and even worse, you can’t really opt out, doesn’t help him.

The problem is that he is lazy and has no motivation (no wonder since Public Schools just make you learn boring facts) to learn for the exams or even participate in the classes, so pretty much the same as me when I was in school, with the diffrence that I had at least ok grades most of the time and I actually liked to participate in the classes since just sitting there was so fu**ing boring. So nobody realy cared.

So I am searching for advices and hints onto how I (or my Parents) can help my brother to at least get threw the minimum years of Public School.

Wow, that is a really shitty situation. Is there anything outside of school he’s interested in? Does he like video games? Maybe he could use Code Academy to teach himself to program. If he can develop a marketable skill over the next 6-7 years, it won’t matter that his grades are bad. I’ve worked with many people who are high school and college dropout who earned six-figure salaries, and some who have started extremely successful businesses. If he can find passion in some area where he can be useful to others, he’ll have an outlet, a refuge, from the misery of school. I feel for him — good luck.

Yea, it sadly is. Wow you took a very good guess. He actually loves video games and I was thinking of teaching him how to programm by making some projekts with him. I do not think the problem is that he can’t find motivation for school or that he gets afwul grates. And even though my parents and the teachers are no big fan of it, he doesn’t seem to like authority at all. Which makes me happy because he might have the right mindset to become a liberty loving person, but sadly this won`t help him much right now. Like you, I think if he is not an complete idiot he will be able to enjoy his life anyway. Problem is he has to get threw this 6 years of school and if his grates are to bad he will have to double some years which will be even worse, since then he has to spend even more years in school.

I don’t like being ordered around either. If I felt trapped for the next 6-7 years someplace I didn’t want to be, I would need an outlet, a place to let my mind and energy vent, or I’d probably implode. I hope he finds one.

I always felt school was a waste of my time. I still feel the same way-about public school anyway. It is a hard thing to go through. I wish I had more motivation because I could now look back and see higher grades. I guess if he can get good grades he can get out of there faster. Not sure what else to say.

Motivating yourself to do well in school to get out faster only goes so far. It worked for me to get past high school and first year undergrad, and then the rest was history according to my cumulative GPA hahaha

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Anonymous January 28, 2016 at 2:53 pm

@Benoît B, I was an average middle school and high school student but a successful college student. Following your passion and interest that others have mentioned will definitely produce the most fruit (benefit). I would quickly get bored with different topics during high school and had a hard time staying motivated to stay focused on one specific discipline. My struggle with this short term interest changed during college.

I originally started to go to university for computer science due to my earlier interests during high school with my hardware repair and programming classes (I was very fortunate back then, my school was STEM heavy before STEM was ever a thing). The computer science program in my college was embarrassingly outdated and involved students correcting the professor to help explain certain concepts and practices. I changed my major to Aviation Science (a quietly repressed interest I had since childhood) and started my flight training during the second half of my freshman year. Aerospace was a perfect fit for me then because of the requirements to master a large body of a variety of sciences combined with hands on instruction that lead to visible and demonstrable progress and skill acquisition.

If physics started to get boring I’d switch to studying some meteorology then human biology, calculus, aviation law, human factors, air traffic control, fundamentals of instruction (education), etc. To me, aviation science was the perfect major for a restless mind that quickly grew bored of one specific topic. You could almost call it a degree in “liberal sciences” instead of the “liberal arts”. Anyways, what I’m trying to get at is that there are so many options for your brother to go down. He doesn’t have to be just a historian, a German language instructor, an astrophysicist or anything that’s hyper-specialized. As he gets older, keep your ear to the things he expresses having interest in and encourage his own self-guided learning and discovery.

@ljaluague True and it didnt really motivate me when I was in there. It seemed as if it would never end for me lol

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Anonymous February 2, 2016 at 9:46 am

@Benoît B I think I placed my reply comment under the wrong reply thread. In addition to what I was mentioning earlier about your brother there is a great TEDTalk: Why Some of Us Don’t Have One True Calling that I highly suggest you watch and share with your brother. I think a lot of us here definitely fall into this category. It’s not a flaw, we’re just all a bunch of multipotentialites 😉

In response to both of your comments. I understand what you and the others are trying to tell me and I have more or less the same mindset. I know their are nearly unlimited options on how to design your needs (in buyable goods) and your revenue so that it works out for yourself, I know that because I am actually into alternativ lifestyles myself. And I will try to show my brother all the possibilities their are outhere so that he can choose the lifestyle that fits him best. But my (his) problem is that he still has to get through this school and I was searching for some tipps and tricks on how to make it easier for him.
I think I saw this talk allready, but maybe I should watch it again since I don’t think I have one true calling either.

You might help make a difference if you can convince your brother that it is not the “facts” that that the teachers/education machine want him to learn/memorize that are important, but rather the source of the facts and how to find them when they are needed. One of the reasons that Edison was successful was because he had a staff that could “find” the answer to almost any question. Learning the organization and use of reference sources is more important than memorizing particular facts of history. It takes some knowledge to run even a google search if you want specific information.